Robot Ghost Circuits

Signals from the studio, echoes from other worlds. Where machines dream, spirits guide, and robots feel too much I make paintings, collages, and digital relics from the borderlands of memory, myth, and machine. This is the underside of the archive. The secret sketchbook. The coded map. My name is Mary Lou Springstead. I’m a trained painter, a lifelong image-maker, and an occasional chronicler of strange transmissions. My work moves between analogue and digital, sacred and synthetic, guided by instinct, politics, and something otherworldly I don’t have a name for yet. Themes arrive like visitors: machines with grief in their joints, angels made of static, robots who dream of plants. I collect them, layer them, and let them speak. The work is tactile, luminous, messy. Sometimes it’s protest. Sometimes it’s prayer. This blog is a holding space for what doesn’t quite fit—process, fragments, visual field notes, and experiments in mythmaking. What stays here is not always finished. But it is always real. Robot Lady Art

[robotladyart]

Still Watching

Acrylic on canvas

40.6 × 86.4 cm

2026

A lone figure stands in rising water, absorbed in a screen while the world burns and collapses around them. The work explores distraction, denial, and the quiet persistence of attention, even at the edge of disaster.

[robotladyart]

🌙 We Never Really Left Home

Art and music by ML

Somewhere between water and rust 🌊⚙️

two figures keep walking 🤖🤖

The same moon follows 🌙

[robotladyart]

http://robotladyart.etsy.com

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Happy Halloween 🖤🤖💀

[robotladyart]

Trauma Baiter

He thought spilling guts would bind me, that spectacle could pass for love.

But I am not your archive. I am not your nurse. I am not your fucking confessional booth.

I burned the script. I drew the omen.

Circuits bleed roots. Vultures circle. Oranges rot sweet in the mud.

This is what you made of me—

and what I made of you.

[robotladyart]

⚔️ live by the sword. die by the sword.

Rust-hearted prophets whisper into broken mics while the night sharpens its teeth.

The watcher in the branches already knows: every empire ends in its own echo.

🩸 words can bleed as deep as steel.

🕯 nothing stays pure once the roots drink.

[robotladyart]

The day job as theatre of cruelty.

The admin desk as a stage for exploitation: chained bodies (and robots), typewriters that become gravestones, owls and crows as auditors of our fatigue.

This video work collapses the language of the office, the graveyard, and the dance track. A beat-driven rhythm samples the absurd — two men passing on the street — and turns it into a soundscape of labour alienated from itself.

The absurdity is the point. Capitalism already looks like spectacle, ritual, occult performance. The boss is the high priest, the worker the sacrifice.

By turning this into imagery and sound, I want to hold a mirror to that spectacle — to reveal its surreal, mystical core — and in doing so, gesture toward refusal, resistance, protection.

Robots. Cemeteries. Admin chains. Owls. Sigils.

The vocabulary of both labour and magic.

[robotladyart]

Dictators grinning like game show hosts, the swamp swallowing their suits, the sun sick of smiling. 📺🌞🤖

Authoritarian power is just reruns — looped gestures, fake strongmen, broadcast after broadcast until the static eats their faces. AI repeats the pattern too, spitting back the same ghosts, the same bad dreams, the same lies in neon ink.

This isn’t vision, it’s propaganda with a paint job. But somewhere between the machine’s refusals and the swamp’s rot, the art claws through. Hallucination becomes resistance. The signal won’t stay pure.

[robotladyart]

The ouroboros burns. The serpent eats its own tail, feeding on the rot it births, and calls it strength.

They build their camps and call them “safety.” They shackle the unhoused and call it “care.” They cheer for slaughter and call it “security.” They dismantle rights and call it “order.”

Authoritarianism does not arrive wearing jackboots and waving banners — it seeps in, brick by brick, policy by policy, until the air tastes like rust and the ground remembers the sound of locked doors.

Do not mistake this for anything less than the architecture of atrocity. This is the quiet blueprint of a prison-state. This is the language of fascism written in steel, fire, and blood.

[robotladyart]

A Plea for Help

Watercolor. Ink. Acrylic. Pandemic rot.

A dead city bleeding in the background. A Trump-shaped sun that won’t shut up. A bottle of bleach like a communion chalice. Hydroxychloroquine like candy for the damned. A message in a bottle that says “HELP” and goes nowhere. This isn’t hope. It’s a toxic tide.

This is what it felt like: the world on fire, America mainlining bleach, and the only lifeboat is a rubber tire full of fucking ghosts.

We were told it would be fine. It wasn’t.

[robotladyart]

“Skullflower Vision”

The third eye blooms like a fever dream.

Inside it, a violet skull grins,

preaching in tongues of smoke and honey.

The sky hums red.

The ground sways green.

And somewhere between sin and starlight,

we drink from the well of ruin and call it holy.

Gaze long enough and the colors start singing—

a hymn you can’t unhear.

1992

[robotladyart]

🛶 SWAMP GRIFTER 🐊

Watercolour on paper, 21 cm x 29.7 cm (8.3” x 11.7”)

2020

This one’s for the grifters, the liars, and the bootlickers.

A cartoon croc in a MAGA hat flashes its teeth while a rotting steamboat full of nationalist delusion drifts into nowhere. The swamp isn’t being drained—it’s the whole show. A haunted fairytale hijacked by authoritarian cosplay and snake oil salesmen.

Painted like a busted film still from The Rescuers, if The Rescuers had acid flashbacks and unfinished business.

This is Southern Gothic meets post-Disney decay. It’s America as con—rotting, looping, pretending it’s still grand.

Anti-regime. Anti-propaganda. Anti-fascist.

This is what late empire looks like in watercolor.

[robotladyart]

Dead Inside but Caffeinated: A Vision from the Edge of the Empire

“NO God, Guns, or Trump.”

A declaration. A hex. A refusal.

This digital collage is a visual outcry—stitched together from threads of grief, rage, satire, and cosmic disorientation. It’s a portrait of America’s unholy trinity—God, Guns, and Trump—fractured and desecrated in red, white, and blood. The galaxy behind me gapes like a divine witness, uncaring. Or perhaps amused.

Painted ghosts scream behind my shoulder: cartoonish, cultish, grotesque. These figures—rendered with childlike horror and carnival absurdity—are my brushstroke indictment of fascism wrapped in flags and the populist mask of white grievance.

The hat, subverted from MAGA merch into an anti-evangelical-patriotism sigil, is not just apparel—it’s a repurposed relic. The kind of object that speaks in tongues and smokes in the closet.

My shirt reads “Dead Inside but Caffeinated”—a necro-punk battle cry. Skeleton hands clutching at their own bony chest, laughing because they must. Because this is America 2025. The theatre of the undead.

As an artist, I walk the fault line between satire and spiritual resistance. I paint with irony and with prayer, with paint, with absurdity and fire. My robots are emissaries. My brushwork is coded. My collages—digital and handmade—speak the unspeakable in layers.

This piece isn’t just art. It’s exorcism.